Born to be viral: Flying robots team up to juggle

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Our flying robot overlords seem to have a fun side after all. In this video, watch two quadrocopters team up to skillfully juggle a ball, thanks to software developed by Sergei Lupashin and colleagues at ETH Zurich. The machines can't juggle perfectly - they often drop the ball after several exchanges - but the team is constantly refining the system and testing it in their Flying Machine Area.

The position of the copters and the ball are tracked by cameras and communicated to a computer. Software calculates the ball's trajectory and how the two machines should move to keep the ball in the air. It then sends commands to the copters so they can fly into place.

According to Lupashin, getting the copters to hit a ball is difficult since they use a paddle attached to their center-of-mass. For every hit, they have to move their entire bodies into the correct position, he says:

Imagine playing tennis or squash where you have to hit the ball with a paddle attached to your chest or forehead - that's the human equivalent of what a quadrocopter is doing